Hello everybody, As we start the 3.27.x / 3.28 development cycle with this week's 3.27.1 release, I'd like to notify you that I want to remove the Telepathy integration from GNOME Online Accounts in another 6 months starting from 3.29.1. Stated differently, when GNOME 3.30 gets released in the autumn of 2018, the Telepathy provider will be gone from GOA.
The Telepathy provider was disabled by default during the previous development cycle, version 3.25.3 to be precise, and it will continue to remain so during the 3.27.x / 3.28 cycle. The Empathy / Telepathy stack is no longer as strongly maintained as it used to be, and the consensus in GNOME is to deprecate it. Moreover, the Telepathy integration in GOA doesn't actually buy the user any benefits. The original plan was to disable Empathy's own account management UI (ie. empathy-accounts), but that never happened. So, we ended up with two UIs, which at times had slightly divergent behaviour - Microsoft account added via OAuth2 / XMPP versus raw passwords / legacy pre-XMPP protocol. These days we have Polari, which also has its own accounts UI, which is in keeping with its status as a non-core application. Internally, the code isn't architected as a generic chat provider with relatively light dependencies, as is the case for most of the other providers in GOA. It really is targetted for Telepathy only, and works as a two-way bridge between two account management systems instead of being strictly acyclic. This adds maintenance burden, and had I known that Empathy / Telepathy was going to be abandoned soon after merging the bridge, I'd probably have pushed harder for a different approach. Note that this means a client like Pidgin or Gaim cannot use the Telepathy provider because then they would grow a needless dependency on another chat system. Fast forward to the present, I want to port GNOME Online Accounts to Meson. To do that, first the telepathy-account-widgets submodule, which provides the UI for Telepathy accounts, needs to be ported. That's a problem because I don't want go around hacking the build systems of unmaintained modules. Even if somebody else was to do it, there will inevitably be some fallout, and as someone who gets to keep the Empathy / Telepathy stack on life support, I am really not looking forward to that prospect. So the upshot of all this is that I'll be removing the Telepathy provider from GOA when the 3.29.x / 3.30 cycle starts after spring 2018, and it won't be part of the GNOME 3.30 release in autumn 2018. Have a nice day & happy hacking, Rishi _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list